After my 6th grade year, I was hospitalized briefly for a stomach virus. We lived at Two Rock Ranch Station Army post in rural Sonoma County CA that year and the year before. TRRS was a secure base enclosing 800 acres of mostly farmland, small forests, creeks and rolling hills, a great place for kids to grow up, as my brothers and I found. At that time, 1962, the post belonged to the Army Security Agency and was a signal intercept station. Dad was an ASA Captain there and we lived on a hill with other officers' families in a housing area of large duplexes.
That summer I was dispatched to spend a week in the nearest Armed Forces hospital. (My whole childhood and young adulthood was spent receiving medical care through this government run system with good results. I think a single-payer system is the answer to our present woes, or at least a public option. But that's another story.) I didn't feel bad once the stomach cramps were gone but tests had to be run to rule out things.
Since I felt lively, this week away was an adventure for me, a vacation from the norm. I spent long hours making up stories for my journal, illustrating everything with drawings. I wrote protracted fanciful letters to my girlfriends back home, Shelly Mathis, Gail Gerwitz, Fie Hay. I pasted on false fingernails and painted them lilac, alarming the nurses who came in to take my pulse morning and evening. I listened to my new transister radio and danced to Four Seasons songs when no one was looking. The hospital staff transferred me out of the children's ward quickly because I was too old, too long and tall for the beds, but they were nervous about my being in the women's ward. There I shared a room with up to four others, and they didn't like my overhearing all the "women troubles," which I, of course, urgently strove to hear and worked on like a detective with mysteries to solve. Miscarriages, ectopia, unwed pregnancies, and uterine tumors became the subject of many of my short stories at this time.
From my time in that hospital, with its steel gray walls, large sunny windows, and billowy curtains between our patient beds, most of all I remember the food. Children always remember food, don't they? Especially desserts and treats, and more especially if they are different and new. Because my family moved to a different place every year or two with my dad's Army transfers, I could tell you all about new food, from tacos and corn chips in Southern California in 1957 to fresh avocado, papaya, and coconuts in Hawaii in 1953 to divinity candy my dad made in 1959 but my Aunt Arlyss perfected the next year.
In this hospital, after my 6th grade year, they had plenty of snacks. It was as if we lived in England and were having elevensies, tea time, and "supper," that is, two between meal snacks and a bedtime one.
I was always excited about these snacks. Chocolate chip cookies! Koolaid! Gooey caramel anything? No? What, fruit? I like fruit, but ... oh, I had a sweet tooth in those days. Whenever a snack was brought, my eye saw what I was used to, or maybe it was only what I wanted, and then my taste buds were alarmed at the startling difference of the reality.
This hospital was determined to serve healthful snacks. What horror. What I thought were gooey coconut cookies were...oatmeal. My eyes saw sugary grape Koolaid, but no, what's this? My mouth wasn't used to it (too expensive for Mom to serve at home) but it had to be-- real grape juice. The final outrage occurred when I saw arriving my ideal, the perfect confection, a buttery brown-sugary, melty-chocolate-chunky, big-as-your-fist Tollhouse Cookie. (That's what chocolate chip cookies were called back then, when Nestle held the copyright on the recipe.)
I savored the look of it, the heft of it, as I slowly arced the cookie toward my mouth, inhaling deeply to anticipate the flavor-- but what's this? No butterscotchy scent of brown sugar and butter? Instead I caught an odd hint of cinnamon, and such a lack of butter as can only be described as a flatness, almost a cardboard smell.
I momentarily stopped the cookie in its ascent, to take a closer look. Yes, it was the proper tan color, richly studded with dark brown dollops. What else could it be? Throwing caution to the winds, disregarding the suspicions of my senses, I bit down. Alert! Alert! Warning! Imposter! Ersatz cookie alert! Ugh, phew. Oh, nooooo. It was a raisin cookie.
Now, I like raisins. I like those little boxes of Sun-Maid Mom packs in my lunches. I like raisin and carrot salad. I like raisin pie. But when one's 6th-grade mouth is set for chocolate chip and instead the cookie you taste is raisin-- there is no measure that can plumb the depths of your disappointment. How could the medical establishment think the nutritional value inherent in these cookies could substitute for the flavor, the mouth-feel, the deliciousness of a true cookie, a chocolate chip cookie? I have not yet, as you might have guessed, recovered from the trauma.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Saturday, September 5, 2009
The no fear public option in health care insurance reform
My uncle and also another friend have been kept alive thanks to sixty-four years (!) of Veterans Administration free health care which they love and are appreciative for, qualifying after having served as little as 8 months in the Armed Forces during WWII. My dad and his wife are the recipients of phenomenal and virtually free health care through his retirement from the Army called Tri-Care For Life. All my (slightly older) friends who are now on Medicare would fight to the death to keep their coverage, and I would love to be able to get it, would be grateful to be able to buy into Medicare.
So why are some (irritatingly vocal) folks and members of Congress so afraid of the public option? Perhaps they don't know the definition and don't realize we have in fact government forms of health care which are working very well, thank you. Read on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care That Works
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 2, 2009
Here’s a paradox.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Health care reform may be defeated this year in part because so many Americans believe the government can’t do anything right and fear that a doctor will come to resemble an I.R.S. agent with a scalpel. Yet the part of America’s health care system that consumers like best is the government-run part.
Fifty-six to 60 percent of people in government-run Medicare rate it a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. In contrast, only 40 percent of those enrolled in private insurance rank their plans that high.
Multiple surveys back that up. For example, 68 percent of those in Medicare feel that their own interests are the priority, compared with only 48 percent of those enrolled in private insurance.
In truth, despite the deeply ingrained American conviction that government is bumbling when it is not evil, government intervention has been a step up in some areas from the private sector.
Until the mid-19th century, firefighting was left mostly to a mishmash of volunteer crews and private fire insurance companies. In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting.
So almost every country moved to what today’s health insurance lobbyists might label “socialized firefighting.” In effect, we have a single-payer system of public fire departments.
We have the same for policing. If the security guard business were as powerful as the health insurance industry, then it would be denouncing “government takeovers” and “socialized police work.”
Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where governments fill needs better than free markets: fire protection, police work, education, postal service, libraries, health care. The United States goes along with this international trend in every area but one: health care.
The truth is that government, for all its flaws, manages to do some things right, so that today few people doubt the wisdom of public police or firefighters. And the government has a particularly good record in medical care.
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
A study by the Rand Corporation concluded that compared with a national sample, Americans treated in veterans hospitals “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.” The difference was particularly large in preventive medicine: veterans were nearly 50 percent more likely to receive recommended care than Americans as a whole.
“If other health care providers followed the V.A.’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system,” Rand reported.
As for the other big government-run health care system in the United States, Medicare spends perhaps one-sixth as much on administration as private health insurers, although the comparison is imperfect and controversial.
But the biggest weakness of private industry is not inefficiency but unfairness. The business model of private insurance has become, in part, to collect premiums from healthy people and reject those likely to get sick — or, if they start out healthy and then get sick, to find a way to cancel their coverage.
A reader wrote in this week to tell me about a colleague of hers who had health insurance through her company. The woman received a cancer diagnosis a few weeks ago, and she now faces chemotherapy co-payments that she cannot afford. Worse, because she is now unable to work and has to focus on treatment, she has been shifted to short-term disability for 90 days — and after that, she will lose her employer health insurance.
She can keep her insurance if she makes Cobra payments on her own, but she can’t afford this. In her case, her company will voluntarily help her — but I just don’t understand why we may be about to reject health reform and stick with a dysfunctional system that takes away the health coverage of hard-working Americans when they become too sick with cancer to work.
On my blog, foreigners regularly express bewilderment that America may reject reform and stick with a system that drives families into bankruptcy when they get sick. That’s what they expect from the Central African Republic, not the United States.
Let’s hope we won’t miss this chance. A public role in health care shouldn’t be any scarier or more repugnant than a public fire department.
• A version of this Nicholas D. Kristof article appeared in print on September 3, 2009, on page A31 of the New York edition of The New York Times.
So why are some (irritatingly vocal) folks and members of Congress so afraid of the public option? Perhaps they don't know the definition and don't realize we have in fact government forms of health care which are working very well, thank you. Read on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/opinion/03kristof.html?_r=2&ref=opinion
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care That Works
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: September 2, 2009
Here’s a paradox.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Health care reform may be defeated this year in part because so many Americans believe the government can’t do anything right and fear that a doctor will come to resemble an I.R.S. agent with a scalpel. Yet the part of America’s health care system that consumers like best is the government-run part.
Fifty-six to 60 percent of people in government-run Medicare rate it a 9 or 10 on a 10-point scale. In contrast, only 40 percent of those enrolled in private insurance rank their plans that high.
Multiple surveys back that up. For example, 68 percent of those in Medicare feel that their own interests are the priority, compared with only 48 percent of those enrolled in private insurance.
In truth, despite the deeply ingrained American conviction that government is bumbling when it is not evil, government intervention has been a step up in some areas from the private sector.
Until the mid-19th century, firefighting was left mostly to a mishmash of volunteer crews and private fire insurance companies. In New York City, according to accounts in The New York Times in the 1850s and 1860s, firefighting often descended into chaos, with drunkenness and looting.
So almost every country moved to what today’s health insurance lobbyists might label “socialized firefighting.” In effect, we have a single-payer system of public fire departments.
We have the same for policing. If the security guard business were as powerful as the health insurance industry, then it would be denouncing “government takeovers” and “socialized police work.”
Throughout the industrialized world, there are a handful of these areas where governments fill needs better than free markets: fire protection, police work, education, postal service, libraries, health care. The United States goes along with this international trend in every area but one: health care.
The truth is that government, for all its flaws, manages to do some things right, so that today few people doubt the wisdom of public police or firefighters. And the government has a particularly good record in medical care.
Take the hospital system run by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the largest integrated health system in the United States. It is fully government run, much more “socialized medicine” than is Canadian health care with its private doctors and hospitals. And the system for veterans is by all accounts one of the best-performing and most cost-effective elements in the American medical establishment.
A study by the Rand Corporation concluded that compared with a national sample, Americans treated in veterans hospitals “received consistently better care across the board, including screening, diagnosis, treatment and follow-up.” The difference was particularly large in preventive medicine: veterans were nearly 50 percent more likely to receive recommended care than Americans as a whole.
“If other health care providers followed the V.A.’s lead, it would be a major step toward improving the quality of care across the U.S. health care system,” Rand reported.
As for the other big government-run health care system in the United States, Medicare spends perhaps one-sixth as much on administration as private health insurers, although the comparison is imperfect and controversial.
But the biggest weakness of private industry is not inefficiency but unfairness. The business model of private insurance has become, in part, to collect premiums from healthy people and reject those likely to get sick — or, if they start out healthy and then get sick, to find a way to cancel their coverage.
A reader wrote in this week to tell me about a colleague of hers who had health insurance through her company. The woman received a cancer diagnosis a few weeks ago, and she now faces chemotherapy co-payments that she cannot afford. Worse, because she is now unable to work and has to focus on treatment, she has been shifted to short-term disability for 90 days — and after that, she will lose her employer health insurance.
She can keep her insurance if she makes Cobra payments on her own, but she can’t afford this. In her case, her company will voluntarily help her — but I just don’t understand why we may be about to reject health reform and stick with a dysfunctional system that takes away the health coverage of hard-working Americans when they become too sick with cancer to work.
On my blog, foreigners regularly express bewilderment that America may reject reform and stick with a system that drives families into bankruptcy when they get sick. That’s what they expect from the Central African Republic, not the United States.
Let’s hope we won’t miss this chance. A public role in health care shouldn’t be any scarier or more repugnant than a public fire department.
• A version of this Nicholas D. Kristof article appeared in print on September 3, 2009, on page A31 of the New York edition of The New York Times.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
